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Category: Jose Garza

Lawyers for Texas defended the state’s redistricting plans Tuesday as open, bipartisan and compliant with constitutional requirements despite legal challenges that the new political lines discriminated against minority voters.

“The process was fair and it was open,” attorney Adam Mortara told a panel of three federal judges, which began hearing two weeks of testimony in the Texas redistricting case.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott took the state’s redistricting battle to the U.S. Supreme Court today, asking for an emergency ruling to stop the implementation of court-drawn interim redistricting maps.

Adding another level of complexity to the complicated legal wrangling, candidates across the state began filing paperwork to run for office Monday in districts determined by the court drawn maps.

Abbott acknowledged in his filing that if the Supreme Court were to side with him, primary elections for Texas House and Senate districts in Texas could be delayed until May, because candidates wouldn’t know what districts they’re running in.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have told a federal court in Washington that substantial evidence exists that two controversial Texas redistricting maps were “adopted with discriminatory purpose” and that the state’s standard for determining whether minority representation was harmed has no basis in current federal law. …

Attorney Gerry Hebert, who represents a group of plaintiffs from Fort Worth and Houston, said the dilution of the Hispanic vote in two South Texas congressional districts made sense from a political standpoint but it had violated the Voting Rights Act.

“[The] minority community was sliced and diced to prevent them from electing the candidate of their choice,” he said.